More and more enterprise companies are migrating to the AWS Cloud and there are a number of reasons why. While every organization is going to have their own unique motivations, common drivers include exiting data centers, increasing business agility, improving workforce productivity, gaining transparency in operational costs and reducing risk.

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is designed to help enterprises that are committed to a migration journey achieve a range of these business benefits by migrating existing workloads to Amazon Web Services. MAP has been created to provide consulting support, training and services credits to reduce the risk of migrating to the cloud, build a strong operational foundation and help offset the initial cost of migrations. It includes a migration methodology for executing legacy migrations in a methodical way as well as robust set of tools to automate and accelerate common migration scenarios.

By migrating to AWS, enterprises will be able to focus on business innovation instead of dedicating time and attention to maintaining their existing systems and technical debt. Sacrifices and painful trade-offs no longer have to be made to get something to market quickly. Instead, enterprises can focus on differentiating their business in the marketplace and taking advantage of new capabilities.

By building the foundation to operate mission critical workloads on AWS, you will build capabilities that can be leveraged across a variety of projects. We have a number of resources to support and sustain your migration efforts including an experienced partner ecosystem to execute migrations, our AWS Professional Services team to provide best practices and prescriptive advice and a training program to help IT professionals understand and carry out migrations successfully.

We have pooled the experience of our Professional Services and partner teams to develop a structured methodology to prepare you for the migration and then successfully execute. This starts with an assessment to determine baseline capabilities, a structured migration readiness and planning project to build the capabilities and plan to migrate and operate at scale, and then the approach and support to successfully execute those migrations.

The Migration Acceleration Program consists of a three step approach for migrating to AWS that includes the following:

The MRA phase determines the current state of your readiness to migrate and identifies areas where you already have strong capabilities and where further development is needed to migrate at scale. The MRA is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and evaluates cloud readiness along eight dimensions (landing zone, operating model, security and compliance, migration process experience, skills and center of excellence, migration plan and business plan). Priorities and gaps identified during the assessment help define the scope for the Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) phase. The MRA typically involves a 1 day workshop conducted by AWS and/or a MAP Partner.

During the Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) phase, you will team with AWS Professional Services and/or MAP Partner to build the foundation for a large-scale migration and gain experience migrating and operating several workloads on AWS. AWS and our MAP partners have developed a prescriptive methodology and approach based on best practices gleaned from hundreds of customer migration projects that significantly reduce time to migrate while lowering cost and risk. To prepare a cloud operational foundation, you will follow an agile approach with workstreams for cloud center of excellence, landing zone, operation model, and security and compliance. In addition, we’ll work with you to develop a strong migration plan and compelling business case that articulates the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for a cloud migration. At the end of this phase, which is usually completed in 2-4 months, you will be ready to migrate at scale.

In the Migration phase, you will execute the migration plan developed during the Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) phase, typically with the assistance of AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner. A key component is establishing a “migration factory” composed of teams, tools and processes to streamline the movement of workloads from on-premises to AWS. The migration factory teams work through a prioritized backlog of workloads based on migration patterns identified in the portfolio discovery and planning process. Where possible we apply known migration and operational patterns to accelerate the movement of workloads, reduce risk and improve the final outcome. With this approach, you will quickly start to achieve the business benefits of lower operating costs and gaining agility and scalability. Once in the cloud, you can focus on optimization of applications, processes, operations and costs. This phase typically takes 12-24 months to execute.

We’ve worked to develop a broad partner ecosystem for cloud migrations. Partners who have achieved our migration competency have a proven track record of delivering large-scale legacy migrations and having the people, process and technology capabilities available to help customers with large migrations. They have demonstrated capabilities in either our DevOps or Managed Service Provider program, and, on top of this, we require them to have a migration methodology that is consistent with what we see works, which we regularly evaluate against our current migration best practices. These partners include: